loteck
Joined 14 years ago
Karma
4,322
Submissions
465
Member since
Jun 20
[email protected]
Signal: loteck.01
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 1 month ago
Artificial obsolescence!
Comment · 3 months ago
It's like asking the prisoners in the panopticon whether they behave differently due to the risk of being watched. The answer is 100% yes, whether they know it or not. That's the point.
Comment · 4 months ago
I came in to the thread anticipating a highly placed tptacek comment defending Flock without grappling with any of their numerous problems, and claiming that "regular people" love Flock. Weird how predictable that's become.
Comment · 4 months ago
They simply didn't properly identify the vehicle because Flock's ALPR gave them the pass. The innocent person would not have needed "photo proof" of his distant location if the ALPR didn't exist in the first place. Then he would not have been forced to spend a month of his life in jail.
Comment · 4 months ago
We blame the technology because police misusing their powers is a tale as old as police, is demonstrably not fixable, and this technology is at fault for aggressively selling itself to police to give them these powers that we all know will be misused. Flock absolutely bears significant responsibility for creating the technology and conditions for this unjust behavior to exist, and continuing to advocate against those pushing back on it by trying to brand them as terrorists.
Comment · 5 months ago
In my city, our police recently reported that in one year, they searched the ALPR database 240,000 times.
Of those searches, approximately 165 of them assisted any police case, in any way.
What is ALPR being used for the other 99.8% of the time?
Comment · 5 months ago
"Ownership" of data may have little or nothing to do with control of the data, depending on what other rights you agree to give up. Your Flock contract may specify your ownership of the data and then in the next sentence release to Flock all or most control of that data (you still own it!).
Comment · 5 months ago
It’s possible - tech is neutral
The people creating, funding, controlling, developing, deploying and using the tech are not neutral, and the technology is indistinguishable from those people. In light of that, I would argue your assertion, that the "tech is neutral", is nothing more than rhetoric and that in every meaningful way the tech lacks neutrality.
Comment · 5 months ago
Isn't PG's conflation of Denmark's high income tax with a proposed wealth tax a clear flaw in his math and argument re: "the highest taxes in the world"? Why wouldn't you instead compare to other countries that also have both income and wealth taxes?
Comment · 6 months ago
What is libertarian about funding, building and defending government mass surveillance for money?
Comment · 6 months ago
The data set IJ is providing here is situations where stalking was reported/suspected, investigated, discovered, and prosecuted. Other stalking cases could fail any one of those stages and be invisible to the public.
Comment · 6 months ago
In my town, we have Flock. I request the audit logs that show how police are searching the Flock system.
In November 2025 and prior, the logs were listed by USERID and I could independently correlate quantity of searches by USERID to detect unusual search behavior. This same methodology has been used to catch police stalking in at least one other city.
In December 2025, Flock decided to "improve" its system. All searches on the audit log are now completely serialized, anonymized. This "improvement" came after 2025 turned out several cases of police stalking using Flock.
Comment · 6 months ago
Where is this?